My wife has asked me not to turn the house into a tech junkyard.
“What do you mean, ‘Why do I need that stack of old ThinkPads?’. They were free!”
Who needs virtual machines when I can just use a separate device for every distro I want to try?
Very true. Also, redundancy
Why would I need an enterprise router if I can have a superfast, very extendable, very flexible and redundant router with two old desktop machines?
I had 11 OSes on a single laptop once, including a vestigial Vista partition that was barely hanging on
Where are you all getting free thinkpads from?
We are trash pandas at your next companys trash bin. They follow like minions M$ directly into Win11 hell.
Make friends with your local IT guys. Thinkpads are less common these days, because they’re “Chinese”, so it is more common to find dells (which usually are worse in my experience).
Unrelated, but I just took apart my old IBM thinkpad from 2003/2004 to clean it up and get all nice and pretty for it’s last few years of updates. I also did my newer-ish HP laptop from 2016 at the same time.
The thinkpad was just beautifully laid out, with thought put into the placement of vents, heat sinks, heat generating components, alternative air pathways if the entire bottom was blocked, easy maintenance of components, etc.
The HP was …not. The weakest ass heat sink I’ve ever seen, miles away from the processor (no wonder it sounded like a wind tunnel when playing a youtube video). One intake vent where your thigh would be if in your lap and the exhaust right where your knee would be. Extra bonus was the placement of the CPU (running usually 80c+) is right above your junk, the vent being offset from the processor a smidge.
Granted I’m comparing enterprise vs consumer laptop in the days when there was a massive difference in quality between the two, but damn, this experience has me decided (again) that internal layout and design is just as important as specs, even more so if you need more powerful components.
I have a literal suitcase full if 4TB SAS drives. Because they were free and pretty much unused.
Fun fact: A pelicase of 37 3.5" drives is the max weight you’re allowed in a single checked piece with common airlines. I had to give three drives to the check in clerk.
I mean if they’re free you can always sell them for cheap and feel good about making some money while reducing e-waste
Usually it’s more a give away after installing mint on them, but it’s better than genuinely just tossing them for stuff newer than 7-8th gen intel.
And just think how quickly you can get them all up and running with NixOS! All those endless hours of learning finally put to good use!
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What if I like being the clown?
Windows: creates e-waste
Linux: undoes e-waste
Windows: creates e-waste
Linux: collects e-waste under the stairs “just in case it’s useful”
All the computers living under the stairs are running some server function. 🤷♂️
They’re heating the room too so technically it’s a radiator with network attached storage!
SmArt RAdiAToR!!
That was literally a hostname I gave one box I had in my life
Madness? Buying a new computer every 2 years because the OS vendor is in cahoots with hardware manufacturers is madness. This is rational usage of resources for your benefit.
OS vendor is in cahoots with hardware manufacturers
That’s pretty much the strategy since Microsoft has been established. It’s not very creative, it’s not even legal, so it’s impressive (in a bad way) that they manage to keep on making it work.
it’s not even legal
Isn’t there one that has both, the OS vendor and the hardware seller as a same entity?
If you can believe it, there are some people who will straight up give you their e-waste, as if it’s trash or something!
I have 3 old cellphones that for the life of me, no matter how hard I tried - couldn’t install an alt android OS on it
One device was compatible - but I couldn’t unlock the boot loader
One device was never tested against any alt OSes
One device was carrier locked.
I also have one old Galaxy Tab that I spent weeks trying to flash another ROM to it - and it fails every time.
I’m 0/4 on trying to reanimate old android hardware - it’s just too difficult and too much hoops to go through.
At least I’m fairly capable with installing Linux on old laptops - and given that a new wave of Win11 compatible laptops is coming - I’ll get to do it more frequently soon.
I haven’t tried to do LUKS yet, and I’m dying to get my hands on a Yubikey and learn what I can make it do.
Mobile device flashing is a fucking alien world. Samsung products are not good for it, especially in the US.
The alt OS’s are mainly built against ancient hardware, and the SKUs that work are so limited that they’re not particularly cheap on the used market.
The best thing you can do is go fairphone or pixel and specifically get one of the models that is directly claimed as supported.
If you can’t get it to work, find the OS forums and hop in, someone will bend over backward to help you out if you’re nice about it.
Mobile device flashing is a fucking alien world. Samsung products are not good for it, especially in the US.
The alt OS’s are mainly built against ancient hardware, and the SKUs that work are so limited that they’re not particularly cheap on the used market.
The best thing you can do is go fairphone or pixel and specifically get one of the models that is directly claimed as supported.
If you can’t get it to work, find the OS forums and hop in, someone will bend over backward to help you out if you’re nice about it.
Yeah. I have like 5 collecting dust. Should give them away (not us) but I’m pretending that I’ll set up a fake cloud service to try terraform (open stack maybe?)
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Getting visibly annoyed whe you find out you can’t easily run mainline linux on some proprietary piece of hardware like a phone or smart TV.
But hey at least my robot vacuum runs on Ubuntu by default lol.
The dump I go to every week to drop off my household garbage has an e waste shed. The guys that work there told me I can pick through it. My basement is a pc graveyard now.
At my dump, you get weighed on the way in and out and you pay for the weight you drop. So, if you leave your garbage and load up some ewaste, it saves you money. They are literally paying you to take it away.
This is the life I want for myself.
I came here to discover why this tactics gets the full clown… yes… we must renew machines and THEN GIVE THEM AWAY.
Yeah I tend to archive hardware till I meet someone who needs a system then I try to put something together that meets their needs. Otherwise I mothball it till I have a hardware failure in one of my servers etc. Thankfully the systems I am taking are heading for a grinder somewhere and not being repurposed.
Exactly.
In the late zeroes, the local recycle place got a bunch of full monitors as a local business transitioned to flat screens. I grabbed about twelve of them, thinking I would be able to build machines for kids without computers. I placed three full systems before we moved and I sadly had to dump a slew of them because we didn’t have space in the moving truck. Learned my lesson.
I’ve started keeping a handful of cases and I test all the hardware, catalog it and then put it in totes layered with anti static bubble wrap. Works great for jamming a large density of hardware in a small space!
This is the life I want for myself.
What’s the oldest?
So far 2008-2009. Waiting to find some quality beige cases lol
I started at the bottom with ewaste, it is truly amazing what companies will just throw away because they don’t want to deal with it.
I am really looking forward to picking up some cheap used mini PCs here in a few months after the market gets flooded from corporates disposing of their old hardware because of the Windows 10 end of life. Consumers have already started ditching them now, but it takes a minute for enterprise to get it to a disposal company who then gets to pawn it off on the used market and that’s the good stuff.
Your average company is woefully prepared to deal with ewaste. If you sell it, there are legal and financial ramifications. Assuming you could make at most a couple hundred on a box, the labor to take it someplace, deal with finance, deal with legal, deal with returns for anything that goes doa in the move. The best you can do is sell or give it to a wholesaler who will give you near nothing for it to shoulder the risk.
Whenever possible, I release old hardware to end users. Refresh it, let them give it to their kids/family/whatever.
Yes! Gotta figure out the new models, hopefully it will be some good times. I just love being 5 years after, at a fraction of the price.
Your average company is woefully prepared to deal with ewaste. If you sell it, there are legal and financial ramifications. Assuming you could make at most a couple hundred on a box, the labor to take it someplace, deal with finance, deal with legal, deal with returns for anything that goes doa in the move. The best you can do is sell or give it to a wholesaler who will give you near nothing for it to shoulder the risk.
Whenever possible, I release old hardware to end users. Refresh it, let them give it to their kids/family/whatever.
I’m pretty certain at this point that I’m about to be forced to buy some programming socks.
Linux being a sexuality is a myth!
I beg to disagree. I am only attracted to Linux users.
Ehh, big bucks and job security can be quite an afridesiac. Just have to make sure to stay clean and presentable, and share some leisure activities that your potential mates will enjoy.
Does anyone have a few optiplexes lying around?
My favorite dependable cheap Linux host. Just sucks about the power draw.
The thinkcentres replaces them well IMO, the tiny is a monster, it’s now my daity driver (6600T IIRC, 32GB, 2TB + a rust spinner) amazing and the power draw is way less than my old optiopexes.
Dude I have my childhood desktop running a jellyfin server, I’d kill for an optiplex
my workplace is selling a few optiplex 3040-s with i3-6100, 4gigs of ram of unqualified variety, 120gb ssd, 512 gb hdd, for about 55$, is that a good deal? (this is in hungary btw)
I never exactly paid for any. Didn’t exactly steal. Didn’t exactly pay. I’d call it “appropriate”
So far I have resisted but I still regret not buying the 160GB ram HP workstation for 20 bucks a couple weeks ago :(
Also, it’s a good idea to have 2 or 3 SBCs sitting in a drawer unused, for the sole purpose of looking at them when the urge to buy something hits again.
160GB ram for 20 bucks… I’d have taken that regardless
160 GB RAM workstation for $20 might be one of those you’ll regret passing on, because I’m getting second-hand regret. Can I send you $20 and you send it to me?
If only the offer wasn’t long gone by now… ;_;
160GB ram for 20 bucks… I’d have taken that regardless
At least you remember where you put them :-|
Hot take
If the world was running on GNU/Linux for endpoints, tech-normies would still be using computers from 2010. And this would cut massively into laptop OEM’s bottom line. Therefore I think it’s a quiet conspiracy where laptop manufacturers or the computer OEMs shut up about Windows being bad because just imagine if everyone would be running GNU/Linux. You could use laptops from 2010 with “regular” distros and be completely fine. With light distros you could use things from the 1990’s for all tech normie tasks, web-browsing, text editing, e-mail, etc.
TLDR: Microshit Windows bad.
Before the arbitrary Windows 11 hardware restrictions, this was exactly what was happening on the Windows side as well. There are still tons of 10-15yo Windows devices around, happily running Win10.
“Regular” people also only upgrade their PC once the old one breaks or if they really encounter something that doesn’t work on the old PC (mostly games if they do play somewhat modern games).
In fact, Windows used to have really awesome long-term-support and forever long upgrade support. You can easily run Win10 on a quality high-performance PC from 2008. But with Win11, they just tossed all that in the drain.
While I do agree that the Windows upgrade circle is vicious and manufacturers benefit from it every time they sell a new machine. It’s not the whole problem Linux needs to over come.
There is an incredibly large amount of sheer inertia that needs to be overcome. And that’s a lot harder to to break than the upgrade cycle because users don’t like change. It’s like a huge boulder rolling down a mountain. And while you can see little pieces of it chip off now and then. It’s due to the sheer size of that boulder that it ain’t stopping anytime soon.
It’s going to a lot longer before the “Year of Linux” ever happens.
I would reverse the clown images so that the user starts as a clown and ends not one
After all, why not? Why shouldn’t I build a Beowulf of my own?
I first heard this term the other day, but it was in the context of “nobody does this anymore”. I looked it up and it sounds cool… is there any reason I shouldn’t consider it in 2025?
It’s been a couple of weeks since i switched to mint and gotta tell you that this is very tempting
